Re: Where in Glorantha

From: Stewart Stansfield <stu_stansfield_at_...>
Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 16:25:30 -0000

> These people have liquid rock at their perusal for creating items.
> Just carve a somewhat oversized mold of what you want out of ice,
and
> bring it into contact with the stuff. This might even work to
create
> rock canoes (perhaps better catamarans).

A novel approach, Joerg, with many practical applications; rock cooled in such a manner could rapidly vitrify, giving a nice glassy (e.g. obsidian) outer lustre - so it could look nice, too! As a little aside, when lava cools, you can very easily model in simple terms how quickly the cooled boundary advances. It's about 1mm in a second, a cm in a minute, 6cm in an hour, 30cm in a day. Large ballistic 'bombs' ejected from volcanoes and vents quite frequenly quench in the air, resulting in a hard glassy crust, but they still possess a warm, glowing interior.

In Glorantha, if it was dramatically appropriate, I wouldn't necessarily expect that penetrative process to happen nearly so quickly when plunged into the moulds, perhaps leading to some novel uses of solid crust/semi-fluid interior lava as quickly made or preprepared  weapons?

[in jest: our ancestors were forced to forage for supplies of obsidian for weapons, and manipulate the material; with a ready supply of lava and ice moulds, here we have a ready made Neolithic Krupp obsidian production line!]

Rock catamarans are a fun idea; if only the our world allowed such options as mythic Glorantha!

Best wishes,

Stu (the volcanologist)

P.S. Given the environment and your ideas, you might find Googling for "Geoffey Pyke" and "Habakkuk" (or "Habbakuk") quite amusing.